Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
PhD English Literature. (University of Manchester). Thesis title: ‘Between Aesthetics and Politics: Music in James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Townsend Warner’.
MA Postcolonial Literature (University of Manchester).
BA (Hons) English Literature (University of Manchester).
Dr. Moss's doctoral thesis examined the relationship between politics and aesthetics by analysing the use of musical forms and themes in modernist literature by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. This thesis is the basis for her first monograph, Modernism, Music and the Politics of Aesthetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), which examines the real-world, political significance of seemingly abstracted things like musical and literary forms. Music plays a crucial role in modernist investigations of language, rational thought and ideology, and applying continental philosophies of music to literary engagements with musical form helps to unpack the political implications of aesthetic forms. This book re-shapes aesthetic, temporal and political understandings of modernism by showing that music’s ambiguity and abstraction remains key to an enduring, politically-motivated modernist desire to use aesthetic forms to engage with otherness and reveal the limitations of rational thought.
Most of Dr. Gemma Moss's published work examines music in literary modernism. She has used interdisciplinary approaches to explore topics such as musical form, nineteenth-century musical aesthetics, popular music, ideology, Wagner and stream of consciousness narrative technique. Dr. Moss has published on a variety of modernist authors including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, and D. H. Lawrence. More recently, she began to investigate the preoccupation with modernist music and modernist literary techniques in the work of contemporary writers such as Richard Powers, Paul Griffiths and Julian Barnes.
Gender and sexuality are issues that are always close at hand in Dr. Moss's research: especially in her work on Sylvia Townsend Warner and E. M. Forster, whose 1913 draft of Maurice is the first English novel to directly address homosexuality. Gemma's work in this area has focused on the relative marginalisation of Sylvia Townsend Warner when compared with other writers of the early to mid-twentieth century. Gemma has also written on Forster’s critique of purity-feminism in Maurice.
In 2019 Dr. Gemma Moss was contracted by Cambridge University Press to produce a new edition of E. M. Forster’s first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread . The Cambridge Editions of the Fictions of E. M. Forster – for which she is also sitting on the editorial board – will become the primary scholarly editions of Forster worldwide. The project addresses the fact that there is, at present, no modern scholarly edition of Forster’s work. In this sense, Forster is behind such lesser-known, early twentieth-century authors as Dorothy Richardson and Wyndham Lewis.
Monographs
Modernism, Music and the Politics of Aesthetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). In press.
Scholarly Editing
E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread, ed. by Gemma C. Moss. The Cambridge Edition of the Fiction of E. M. Forster. (Cambridge University Press 2024). Contracted.
Peer-reviewed articles
‘Music, Noise and the First World War in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End’. Modernist Cultures 12.1 (April 2017), 59-77.
‘Music in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View and Howards End: The Conflicting Presentation of Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics’. English Literature in Transition 59.4 (May 2016), 493-509.
‘“A beginning rather than an end”: Popular Culture and Modernity in D. H. Lawrence’s St Mawr’. Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 4.1 (December 2015), 119-139.
Invited book chapters in peer-reviewed, edited collections
‘The Treatise on Harmony: Ezra Pound as Music Theorist’ in Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts, ed. Roxana Preda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
‘Classical Music and Literature’ in Literature and Sound, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
‘Women in and out: Forster, Florence, Feminism and Social Purity’ in Critical Essays on E. M. Forster’s Maurice, ed. Emma Sutton and Tsung-Han Tsai (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020).
‘Popular Culture’ in The Edinburgh Companion to D.H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). Forthcoming.
Reviews
Vincent Sherry, ed., The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. (Cambridge University Press: 2016). Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies. (In press).
Cecelia Bjorken-Nyberg, The Player Piano and the Edwardian Novel (Ashgate: 2015). English Literature in Transition 60.1 (2017).
Maroula Joannou, ed., The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920–1945 (Palgrave Macmillan: 2012). Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (2013).
